


souvenirs you never lose

by novel_concept26



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27401062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novel_concept26/pseuds/novel_concept26
Summary: A fill for a Tumblr prompt: Five scars Dani found on Jamie’s body (and one she left behind on her heart).
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 26
Kudos: 394





	souvenirs you never lose

It takes Jamie time, to open up. This does not surprise Dani in the least; the Jamie she met at Bly wasn’t the sort to show off--not her innermost secrets, and certainly not her body. Even innocuous bits, elbows and forearms and collarbones, were covered half the time in thick jackets and jumpsuits. She didn’t see Jamie’s knees for the first time until they slept together. 

It feels less like Jamie is hiding something, and more like Jamie appreciates a certain barrier between her body and the rest of the world. Dani can respect that. Knows the value of armor, of a good sweater and pounds of hairspray and the effort to be seen only as you choose. And what Jamie chooses, mostly, is to be seen as the job. As soil under fingernails, as hair messy around her face, as small hoop earrings and old t-shirts and overalls. Jamie doesn’t much put in the effort, because she’s busy channeling all of that effort into more important things. Dani likes this about her. 

Still, for the first month or two, she doesn’t see much of Jamie’s bare skin. Maybe because Jamie is still working out the angles of their relationship in her head, easing in gently even as she’s taking enormous leaps of faith on little more than Dani’s word. Maybe because they’re leaving England (where, even in summer, a chill holds dominion over most nights) for Vermont (where, by the time they arrive, fall is chipping away at what remains of the year). Either way, for a while, Dani thinks Jamie is hiding in baggy sweaters and loose jeans because it’s just _Jamie_. 

It isn’t until they’re in bed in a hotel in Pennsylvania that she thinks for the first time: maybe it’s about something else. Maybe it’s about the lives Jamie lived before meeting her. Maybe there are some boxes Jamie holds close to her chest, will need time to unlock. 

Dani can be patient. 

**1**

“It was a pot,” Jamie says, like that’s the whole of the story, but a story is never so simple or so short as that. In fact, it was not just a pot, not just water, not just a child left to raise a baby like she’d ever be prepared for something like _this_. 

_Jamie, maybe eight years old--she has trouble thinking back this far, has trouble remembering anything from this time with an adult’s clarity--stands as tall as her meager height allows whenever she’s in this house. Shoulders thrown back, chin up, the way she’d seen her mum in shops. Don’t let it get to you. Don’t let it land. Just keep your chin up, eyes forward, and keep walking._

_Jamie, maybe eight years old, with hair that hasn’t been trimmed in months and hand-me-down trousers from Denny, who scuffed his shoes and scowled and said nothing, because what could he do about it? Denny, who keeps his distance, who hasn’t had a kind word for her since she can’t remember when. Jamie tries not to mind. Tries to understand, with an eight-year-old comprehension of human instinct, why her big brother is so determined to shut her out._

_They call her mum things in the street, and maybe that’s why she left. Maybe sticks and stones aren’t all that can tear you up, in the end. Jamie’s had her share of both, has limped home and mopped up tattered knees and scraped cheeks more than she likes to recall, but maybe words can do the same kind of damage if there are enough of them all bound up together._

_Or maybe she left because Jamie wasn’t big enough to wrap her arms around all the little aches her mum was made up of. Maybe because Denny turns up his nose at anything he doesn’t like, and Mikey screams all day, and Jamie--sandwiched between them with no way out--is just too_ small _._

_She’s trying. She’s trying so hard. Mum’s gone, and she hasn’t seen Dad in...what’s it been now, days? A week? She’s losing track fast. Losing track of a lot of things, really. She’s falling asleep draped over her desk, sneakers dangling off the floor, waking to wadded up chunks of paper drenched in someone else’s spit clinging to her neck and hair. Her homework, when it gets done at all, usually gets stolen out of her bag and shredded before she can turn it in. She’s starting to hear the whispers at night, falling asleep with one eye open, one arm wrapped around Mikey’s tiny frame:_ Whore. Cunt. Your mum’s a--

_She doesn't even know what these words_ mean _, but they live beneath her skin like razor blades, and she is so small, and so tired, and only eight, only eight, only--_

_The day the pot goes over, she knows. Something prickles at the back of her neck like a bad itch, like a bug bite, like the worst kind of déjà vu. She’s got Mikey in one arm, bouncing him up and down the way he likes, and the other hand is trying to stir pasta. It’s one of the only things she knows how to make, and Mikey probably should have something more, something better--baby food, or fruit, or something--but Dad’s been gone for maybe-days, maybe-weeks, and Jamie hasn’t figured out how she’s going to buy groceries yet. Problem for another day, she keeps thinking, the idea growing more fringed and frazzled by the hour._

_She’s standing on a chair, baby in one arm, stirring, and it wouldn’t have happened if only she were bigger. It wouldn’t happen if only she could stand taller, if only she didn't need to climb on things to reach, if only she had been able to_ sleep _last night under all Mikey’s whimpers and Denny kicking the wall they share and the hisses of_ whore, your mum’s a dirty whore _reverberating through her head._

_She’s swaying, bouncing Mikey up and down, up and down, and then she’s swaying too far. Too far to the left, too far to correct, and before she knows it, gravity’s got her in a headlock. She pitches sideways, the chair skidding out from under her with a squeal on linoleum, and Mikey is already bawling. Even before her stirring arm yanks the pot. Even before the water sloshes over, all bubbles and steam and Jamie distantly realizes she is shrieking. Her right shoulder comes up in a protective shroud around her little brother, taking as much of the splash as she can stand, and her shirt is pasted to her skin, pasted and bubbling and Jamie hadn’t known anything in the whole world could hurt as much as listening to Mikey screech from against her chest._

“Just a mistake,” she says, yawning in a dimly-lit hotel room. “Just a mistake that a little kid makes on too little sleep and too much responsibility. It’s okay.”

Dani, fingers tracing the edges of raised skin, watches her. Jamie’s head is turned away, her body tucked into the space where Dani suspects she’s always sort of been waiting for someone to lay. Jamie is bunched up tight in the too-high AC, her knees pulled up to her chest, her hand holding gently to the arm Dani has draped loosely over her waist. She feels small in Dani’s arms, which is strange, because Jamie always feels like she takes up so much space in the world. Brass bells on her laugh, brass tacks in her smile, walking like she was told one too many times to sit down and her only response was to flash the finger. 

Dani sometimes wishes she could walk like Jamie does. Breathe like Jamie does. The closest she comes to it are nights like this, pressed close in a bed barely bigger than a twin, Jamie speaking slowly, tiredly, to the opposite wall. 

“You protected him,” Dani says softly. She doesn’t so much like the feel of the scar under the pad of her finger as she does the sensation of Jamie breathing beneath her hand. Jamie, exhausted from a long day on the road, still pressing backward into her like she can never get close enough. 

“Had to,” Jamie says sleepily. “Was so little.”

Dani gets that, understands what it is to hold something small and precious and innocent, and know the world doesn’t care about any of it. The world doesn’t want to keep small, soft things safe. The world just barrels on, riding its own track, and damned be the rest of them. 

She bends her head, presses her lips to the top of Jamie’s shoulder, waits for permission. Jamie exhales, leans her head back. 

“Go on, then.”

She smiles against the soft slope of Jamie, of the lightly freckled skin where no secret memories lurk, and drops a kiss right on the edge of the scar. Jamie doesn’t move, doesn’t push her away, just breathes lightly in and out as Dani explores the spot where a child’s error in judgment left a permanent brand. She traces the map of it with soft lips, careful not to do anything that might cause Jamie unease, careful to simply embrace this part of a woman who pretends it was _just a pot_ because it’s easier than admitting the rest. How much guilt she must have carried for years after. How much it had hurt in ways that have nothing to do with searing burns. 

Her hand tightens across Jamie’s stomach, pulling her reflexively closer, and Jamie arches her back. Her breath is coming a little quicker now, her laugh deep in the shadows cast by one tiny lamp.

“S’just a scar,” she says, and turns in Dani’s arms to kiss her lips. “Just a scar, Poppins. S’all right.”

**2**

A few months go by, Christmas stumbling past with all the grace of a young puppy, the winter months unspooling after in its wake. Eventually, the world begins to wake again. The days warm, the sun casting its light on a new apartment, and Jamie--for the first time since Dani’s known her--is wearing shorts.

“You’ve never told me about this one,” Dani says, seated on the floor of the living room, surrounded by clean laundry. Jamie is on the couch, legs dangling on either side of Dani’s shoulders, a book propped gently against Dani’s hair. 

“Which?” she asks absently, flipping the page. Dani shakes the book away, pressing her thumb lightly to a spot high on Jamie’s right inner thigh. Jamie sucks in a showy breath. “Gettin’ a bit handsy there for all that laundry, Poppins.”

“One,” Dani says, “you can get down here and help me fold. Or two, you can tell me about this one.”

Jamie tosses the book aside, leaning over to look. “Ah. That. Was just a bad jump.”

Dani can tell right away that this is like the burn, that nothing with Jamie’s past was ever _just_ anything. She rests her head against Jamie’s knee, gazing up at her, waiting. 

_Jamie doesn’t advertise it or anything, doesn’t think anyone really needs to know, but she’s always been a good runner. Had to be, when she was little, when the other kids were big and strong and the only thing standing between her and a busted lip was to take off like the wind at the first sight of them. Had to be even more in foster care, when quick thinking and quicker legs were maybe the only chance she had at a peaceful evening._

_She’s not much to look at, seventeen and gangly, hips still figuring themselves out and legs prone to tangling when she’s tired. But, oh, can Jamie run._

_She’s running now, in fact. Running like all the world’s vices have her number and are ringing her up, and it feels_ good _to move like this. Arms pumping, chest expanding and contracting around heaving breaths, eyes wild. A woman dives out of her way, almost upending her shopping cart, and Jamie laughs like she’s got the breath to spare._

_It would all be better, maybe, if she didn’t have the goddamn police on her tail._

_If she didn’t have a rather damning piece of fine silver tucked up under her shirt._

_If she could be sure why she was doing this in the first place._

_But no matter. No worries at all. It’s just pavement beneath her battered old work boots, just the breeze tearing at her hair and the dirty glares of complete strangers, and Jamie thinks,_ Yeah, you wish you could move like this. You wish you had the fucking freedom. 

_Hands, catching at her jacket tails. Big hands, broad-palmed and nasty, and if they close over anything that counts, she knows she’s done for. Knows this is the price of living free: sometimes, you’re free to make choices that get you run down. Not that she cares. Not that she minds it in the least. So long as she can run like this, Jamie figures she can go just about goddamn anywhere._

_She shrugs the groping hands away, hears one of the uniformed men swear as she bolts left down an alley. She knows this street like the back of her hand, knows if she can just get to the end and up over the gate, she’s home free. The cops are older, bigger, slower to swing around such a tight corner, and Jamie’s leap takes her halfway up the chain link before she even has to start her mad scramble._

_She’s all seeking hands and desperate boots, gasping around the burn in her lungs where a fresh smoking habit is not doing her endurance any favors, and she’s laughing still. Even as she goes over, even as she feels something barbed catch along her inner thigh and tear, she’s laughing. Blood, spilling hot down the leg of her jeans, soaking black into the faded denim. Still, she throws her head back and brays insane laughter toward the sun._

_She’s still laughing when she rounds the corner and slams straight into the barrel chest of a beat cop. Not the grabby one; he’s still puffing his way over the fence behind her. This one has mean eyes and a shark’s grin, and when his hand closes over her forearm, all the laughter seventeen years can produce goes rotten in her chest._

_“That,” the cop says, “doesn’t belong to you.”_

_Jamie, lungs heaving, silver hot against her belly, feels the shredded skin of her thigh pull tight, and winces._

“Went in not long after,” she says, shrugging and resting a hand lightly atop Dani’s hair. “Stayed in nearly five years.”

She says it like everything’s okay, like it doesn’t hurt to remember a teenage girl who felt her only recourse from the world was to steal from it. Dani shifts, pulling Jamie’s leg higher on her shoulder, and kisses the jagged remnants of the day Jamie saw her freedom stuffed into a cage. 

“Honest,” Jamie breathes, watching her with eyes gone dark with some mix of desire and memory. “It didn’t even hurt all that much.”

She’s lying, Dani can tell; Jamie’s a terrible liar, so bad at it that she rarely bothers. She holds Jamie’s gaze, feels the uncomfortably sharp edge of the scar against the soft skin of her lower lip. Jamie’s brow pulls like she’s warding off something dangerously akin to shame. 

“I did it because,” she says, and Dani kisses the spot a little harder, shifting to her knees on the carpet. Jamie swallows hard, leaning back against the cushions. “Dani, I was...”

_Don’t_ , Dani thinks. _Don’t say my name like you’re confessing something._ She presses her face against the hot skin of Jamie’s thigh, tries to imagine being young and desperate and foolish. It isn’t so hard to do. 

“You were just a kid,” she says, muffled. Jamie rests a hand lightly on the back of her head, giving her permission. “Just a kid running from so much.”

“It was stupid,” Jamie says thickly. “I was--”

“Doesn’t matter,” Dani says, so fiercely she surprises herself. “Doesn’t matter who you were at seventeen, Jamie. Do you have any idea how stupid _I_ was at seventeen?”

They could go back and forth all day--Jamie’s mistakes stripping her of five years of freedom, Dani’s nearly stripping her of a lifetime. They could, but Jamie is looking at her with such love in her eyes that Dani knows it isn’t the time. It just doesn’t matter, not as much as this place and Jamie’s smile and knowing they're both who they need to be for one another, regardless of the past. 

Her hands are moving toward the zipper of Jamie’s shorts, her mouth light and gentle on Jamie’s skin, and they don’t talk about the scar again. Even with Jamie moving her hips restlessly, even with Dani’s tongue teasing and tasting, even as Jamie grasps her by the hair and makes the most wonderful sounds above her, Dani keeps her thumb pressed gently into that spot. Reclaiming it, in a way. Giving Jamie a dose of what it feels like to fly, to forget all her mistakes, to know only what it is to be loved. 

**3**

She likes to think she knows Jamie’s body pretty well by the time she finds the third scar. They’ve been together three years--three years of blessed, shocking serenity, and Dani feels _good_. Has felt good for so long, in fact, she’s almost forgotten anything else. 

That always feels a little like rattling the bars of some enormous cage, like taunting something huge and bestial she still can’t make out among the trees. Still. It’s no less true.

They’re in the kitchen, of all places, when she notices it. Jamie’s shirt has ridden up as she stretches to retrieve a plate from the cupboard, and there--just under the strap of her bra--a mark Dani’s never really registered before along her ribs. It’s a small thing, a puckered spot smaller than the nail on her pinky. 

“What’s that from?” 

Jamie twists awkwardly, trying to look under her raised arm. “Ah...bit of a mishap with a sharp implement.”

“At the shop?” Dani frowns, trying to imagine what kind of barbed plant it would take to skewer Jamie in such a way. Trying, too, to imagine what would keep Jamie from sheepishly showing her the same night, allowing Dani to patch her with rubbing alcohol, bandages, a long kiss. 

“Uh, no, actually. Inside.” Plate recovered, Jamie drops back down and tries to sidle around Dani toward the stove. Dani raises an eyebrow.

“Inside like in prison?”

“Just about the only place I can think of gets described as such,” Jamie says lightly. Dani jabs her gently in the shoulder.

“So, how’d this one happen?”

“Accidentally.”

Her voice is too light. She’s doing a little dance back and forth, trying to pass Dani, who finally relents. 

“You got accidentally stabbed. In prison.” 

Jamie sighs. “I suppose you’ll want this tale, too, mm?”

Dani gives her a look, half-exasperation, half-deeply entertained. A _well, yes, Jamie, if it isn’t too much hassle to clarify the time you got shanked in prison_ look. She hadn’t even known she had a look like that, but bless Jamie: always teaching her new things about herself.

_It’s not as bad as it seemed at first, Jamie learns quickly. Prison isn’t a picnic by any stretch, but for the most part, the other women leave her be. Maybe it’s something about the way she walks, a trick picked up before she was even into her teens: a good healthy swagger keeps at least the lowest-tier assholes at bay. Walk like you know what you’re doing, walk like you own the place, people are often less likely to take interest. Self-preservation’s a hell of a thing, especially in a place like this._

_She doesn’t make friends, exactly, and maybe that’s for the best. The last friends Jamie made all had too-pretty eyes, too-quick smiles, hands that could produce a knife or the wallet out of your pocket with equal glee. She’d fallen in with them in all the wrong ways, these girls who knew too much of the world and were all too willing to share it with a gutter rat who kissed like it was the only thing worth doing, so long as no one went talking about it later._

_Prison feels like that life magnified to its highest order. Still some pretty eyes, still some too-quick smiles in here, but no one Jamie feels secure even chatting up for long. Everybody in here is in for a reason. Some reasons less justifiable than others, maybe, but still._

_Still, there is one girl. Jamie’s been in for maybe two years, maybe three--gets hard to keep track, after a while--when this one arrives. Fresh meat, as the worst of the women say. Walk says she’s been around the block, but Jamie’s fair certain she can’t be older than Jamie herself was upon arrival. Just a kid._

_Kids make bad choices sometimes, she knows better than anyone. It isn’t her problem._

_Even so, she finds herself trailing along in the kid’s wake. Keeping an eye out. Kids who walk like that sometimes get skipped over--Jamie did, after all, but Jamie also knew when to say when. Head up, mouth shut. The back half of that plan is crucial to survival._

_This kid doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Every time Jamie comes around a corner, it seems like she’s walking in on another bag of bullshit. The kid, always picking fights with women bigger, or crueler, or more capable than she is. By the time Jamie realizes it, she’s taken to talking these women down. An extra pack of cigarettes in exchange for letting the girl live to see another day. A shift in the garden traded for a shift doing laundry. The women grudgingly accept Jamie as one of the level-headed among them, even if they don’t particularly love her for it._

Not my problem _, Jamie thinks each time she sees the girl raise hackles, and each time, she finds herself making it her problem anyway. Stupid. But maybe if she’d had someone in her corner, someone watching her back..._

_She’s been cleaning up after this kid’s messes for about three weeks when it happens. Jamie’s just minding her business, just walking around the yard, and suddenly...there’s pain. A weird, blazing, hooked-talon pain radiating up through her side._

_Pain, and the bared teeth of a teenage girl._

_“You keep the fuck out of my business,” she hisses, brandishing the sharpened bit of what Jamie’s pretty sure was once a toothbrush. “Hear me? Fuck out of it.”_

_Jamie, hand clapped around a small puncture in her jumpsuit, pulls her palm away streaked with red. She raises her eyebrows. “Clear as day.”_

_She doesn’t see the girl again. Doesn’t question it. Can’t bring herself to wonder if it was a transfer or something else altogether. All Jamie knows is, this is what comes of sticking your nose into other people’s shit._

“Wasn’t my finest hour,” she says, checking that the chicken in the oven isn’t actually on fire. “Just left me feeling dumb, really. Imagine getting poked by a goddamn toothbrush.”

“You said it was an accident,” Dani points out. Jamie sighs, opens the fridge, closes it again. 

“It was. Wasn’t meant for me, not really. I just happened to be there. She would’ve stuck anyone silly enough to step in her path.”

There’s a look in Jamie’s eyes Dani isn’t sure she’s seen before. Something tired and responsible, though not exactly guilty. She moves closer, carefully sliding Jamie’s shirt up until the tiny scar is lit by the overhead lamp, gleaming pink against Jamie’s pale skin. 

“I knew better,” Jamie sighs, leaning her hip against the counter as Dani gently touches just beneath the scar. “Saw myself in her, y’know? Same caged-animal desperation. Same darkness. And I didn’t think I could save her or anything so...fucking noble, but I thought maybe she just needed a little time.”

_Time_ , thinks Dani, _right_. The one thing none of them are ensured enough of. 

“Never tried anything like it again,” Jamie says, taking Dani’s hand from her ribs and kissing her knuckles. “Never saw the use. I was in the garden by then, and actually giving therapy its due, and by the time I was up for anything like real human connection, I was out. Probably for the best, though. Imagine if she’d gone for my face.”

She’s teasing, trying to pull the sympathy from Dani’s frown and replace it with something brighter. Dani lets her. There’s little point in dwelling on a scar Jamie has already put to bed, after all. 

“It was good of you,” she says before letting the subject drop. “To try.”

“Maybe,” Jamie says softly. Dani cradles her face in both hands, willing her to believe it. A small smile touches Jamie’s lips. 

“Speaking of trying,” she says, giving Dani a light kiss on the cheek. “Think the bird’s burnin’.”

**4**

The fourth scar, Dani doesn’t feel too terrible about missing. She only finds it by accident one night, sitting on the side of the tub while Jamie soaks off a long day, and only then because her hands are busy massaging Jamie’s scalp. 

“Hey,” she says softly, so as not to shatter a mood built of lit candles and quiet music. Jamie leans her head back, questioning. “There’s something here...”

“Nothing big,” Jamie says, in that tone of voice that says she knows Dani will want to hear anyway. She sighs, patting gently at the foam of bubbles climbing the sides of the tub. “Just another tale of my misguided heroism...”

Dani laughs. “For someone who says she doesn’t care, you sure do get into a lot of hero-shaped situations.”

“Takes one to know one,” Jamie teases, and some of the light fades from Dani’s grin. She doesn’t want to talk about that. Doesn’t want to think about it much. A night a thousand years ago in a lake a million miles away, and though she can feel it all creeping in at the edges, she thinks there’s still time to turn her head. 

“Anyway,” Jamie adds in a slightly louder tone. “Anyway, how are you only just finding this now? With all the times you’ve pulled my hair...”

Her hand is creeping toward Dani’s knee, armed with a thin trail of bubbles. Dani shakes her head. 

“After,” she says, “you tell me the story.”

_Jamie moves into the little flat above the only pub in Bly and thinks,_ Right. Home. _The way a person who’s never really had a home does, she’ll reflect later. When you think a home is just four walls and a bit of furniture, a place to lay your head. At the time, in this moment, it feels better than anything she's ever had._

_She's already decided how the next year--maybe five, maybe ten, maybe the rest of what she’s got ahead of her--will look. Nothing complicated. Nothing big, or heavy, or loud. No pretty eyes. No quick smiles. No one to tell her they’ll love her if only she’d do this one little thing for them, no one to tell her they’ll kiss her if only she can keep her mouth shut about it afterward._

Just this, _she decides, looking at the tiny flat with its tiny sink and tiny bathroom and tiny spot where she’s just managed to wedge a bed._ Just this, and the job. Don’t need much else to get by. 

_It’s a good job, one she was unaccountably lucky to snag so soon out of prison. There’s so much green, she can feel her head spin to look at it all, and knows there is fortune in being asked to care for such an expanse of life. Five years ago, she doesn’t know that she could have done it. Doesn’t know if she could have been trusted. These days, she can’t imagine anything better._

_A good job at a great old manor, flowers as far as the eye can see, and this little flat. She’s doing all right for herself, Jamie. She’s doing just fine._

_Though the pub is a bit much some nights._

_She usually comes straight home after work, uninterested in playing nice with the very specific breed born into Bly. There are some, she supposes, who are pleasant enough, but the grand majority remind her of watching her father climb into and out of a coal mine. They have the same blank expressions, the same vapid smiles, the same shape of mouth that so easily tends toward words like_ whore, whore, your mum’s a--

_Nah. Better keeping to herself, really._

_Every so often, though, despite the noise and the company, she treats herself to a drink. Just one, usually alone at a corner table or the far edge of the bar. At first, there were men who tried to get involved, men who thankfully got the message--or if not_ the _message, at least one similarly postmarked_ not interested _\--fairly quickly. Good for everyone. Jamie’s patience is only so thin, and there is something deeply alluring about a sharp fork on a bad night._

_She’s thinking about this on the night one of these men--one she remembers fairly well from a couple of weeks back, dark hair and patchy beard and bad aftershave--takes it upon himself to visit the backside of a woman’s skirt. His hand is trembling, a whiskey reverb taking the wheel, but it lands exactly where he’s aimed it. The woman, tall and angular and nervous, flinches away._

_Jamie casts a quick glance around, reading the room. Everyone saw that. A pub like this, in a town so small; everyone sees everything. And yet, stunningly, no one is moving._

_The guy knows it, too. She can see it all over his face, the triumph of having gotten away with a misdemeanor. Did it even happen, if no one calls him on it?_

Best not find out _, she thinks, and before she’s got a handle on this impulse, this_ stupid _impulse that once got her_ stabbed _in a prison yard, she’s up and moving._ Just got out _, she reminds herself, even as she’s stepping between the man and his target._

_“Lady doesn’t look like she’s having a good time,” she points out. There’s a feral smile on her lips, one she hasn’t entertained in a very long time. Never ended well, nights that put this smile on like a coat of deepest red._

_“Don’t remember asking,” the man sneers. His breath is so stained with alcohol, it nearly sends her reeling. The woman behind her makes a tiny noise._

_“We could ask,” Jamie says, faux-brightly. She twists at the waist, just enough to glance at the woman. “You having fun with this pack of shit?”_

_“Hey,” he snaps. “Bitch. Who the fuck asked--”_

_She loses her brief struggle with restraint on_ bitch _, her head punching forward into his nose. It hurts, a little. Hurts him worse. He’s staggering back, blood streaming between his fingers when he reaches up. She’s gratified to see he nearly pokes himself in the eye in the process._

_“Might wanna,” she adds to the woman with a little nod toward the door, watching as the drunk’s intended prey rabbits on out into the night. It feels good in a way she doesn’t entirely like, listening to the blood sing in her ears. Men like this shouldn’t be allowed in public. Men like this are--_

_A crashing, tinkling sound, as if from very far away. Jamie’s eyes go dizzy, her hand fumbling for purchase on the bar to stay upright. Glass rains down out of her hair as she gives her head a small, aggrieved shake._

_A bottle. This fucker has a bottle--well, what remains of it after introducing its length to her skull--in hand, his eyes wild. Jamie stares at him with gray disbelief, blood trickling down the back of her neck._

_“You’ve got to be shitting me,” she says thinly, just getting the words out before another man throws himself at the first. Then, a woman, apparently deciding the night has been too dull to stomach. And her friends. Before Jamie knows what’s going on, the world has devolved into the very particular chaos of a bar brawl, people slipping and screaming and slapping at each other with aplomb._

Right _, she thinks distantly, too aware of the blood pooling sticky under her collar._ Head injury. Maybe time to...

_She’s back upstairs, the door double-locked behind her, before anyone notices. Briefly, while pressing a damp cloth to the back of her head and gazing at her nerve-wrackingly gray pallor in the mirror, Jamie considers calling Lord Wingrave and telling him she needs tomorrow off. Imagines how he’d sound, clipped and unyielding, over the phone line._

_Of course, she won’t do it. Of course not. This job is important. This flat is important. Everything else?_

_Everything else is just a reminder of why she’s best left to her own devices._

“So, anyway,” Jamie says, absently patting a foam of bubbles into a small tower. “That’s why I didn’t spend much time in that little pub. If you were curious.”

“Jesus.” Dani can’t quite find something more coherent. “Jesus, didn’t you press charges?”

“For what?” Jamie looks honestly puzzled. “Small town bar, small town life. It happens.”

“You could’ve been concussed!” Dani says, louder than she means to. “You could’ve gone to sleep and never got back up again!”

Jamie reaches up, touches her cheek gently. “Hey. Poppins. Easy. I’m here. Right here.”

Dani realizes the breath is pounding out of her faster than it’s coming back in, a sure sign that she’s about to tip over the precipice of something dark and exhausting. She leans into Jamie’s hand, squeezes her eyes tight. 

“Hey.” Jamie’s sitting up, knees squeaking along the bottom of the bath as she shifts. Water drains over the edge of porcelain, soaking into Dani’s skirt, trickling onto the tile. “Hey. With me, yeah?”

She lets herself be folded into Jamie’s arms, finding balance in each deep breath Jamie draws until Dani is able to match her. Jamie is still sopping wet, slippery, and the most stable thing in the room. 

“Still here,” Jamie says against her ear. “Bit battered around the edges, but it’s nothing new, is it? You still like me this way, dented packaging and all?”

“Love you,” Dani corrects in a thin gasp. Jamie squeezes tighter. 

“Exactly. That scar? It healed up. Like all the rest. It’s just a memory now. Can’t hurt a fly.”

Dani reaches up, combing searching fingers through Jamie’s hair until she finds the spot again. That strange raised bit she must have touched a hundred times, and only just registered. Someone hit Jamie there. Someone _hurt_ Jamie there. 

“I’m all right,” Jamie says, enunciating every word right into her ear. “Save for being a bit chilly. I don’t suppose you can help with that...?”

She’s tickling Dani, moving to kiss her neck with sloppy good humor until Dani finally breaks. Even so, for a moment longer, that image holds: Jamie alone, Jamie holding a cloth to her bleeding scalp, Jamie with tears in her eyes and a decision never to care branded on her heart. 

“I love you,” Dani repeats, so forcefully, Jamie pulls back to look at her. 

“I know, Dani. I love you, too. Now. Hand me a towel, or get in here with me, I’m cold without you.”

**5**

The fifth and final scar, Dani doesn’t have to look for. Jamie shows it off herself, wearing an expression Dani remembers all too well from a panic attack, a shrub not quite big enough to hide behind, a mention of just how many times a day the average Bly groundskeeper bursts into tears. 

It’s a bad day, and this is Jamie’s way of making her smile again. Jamie, whose body she knows so well now, whose heart she knows even better, who wears her ring and has barely left her side in days. 

It’s a bad day. They’re in bed, one of the last places in the world Dani still feels completely safe. All of the mirrors are gone from this room. The pictures on the walls are strategic in placement, making sure Dani can never catch an accidental glimpse of herself--or not--in their glass. This room, where she sleeps with Jamie each night and wakes to Jamie each morning, is a bastion against the monsters. 

“Here,” Jamie says. She is, as Dani prefers her, without pants, hair up in a messy tangle, gold band gleaming on her finger. She is also, baffling Dani, holding up the bottom of her left foot. 

“What...?”

“This,” Jamie says, “may be the final frontier.”

“Your...foot,” Dani replies slowly, wondering if the increasing bad spots are taking a toll on her memory. Maybe this is a conversation that would make sense, if only she hadn’t spent so much of yesterday in a daze. 

“My foot,” Jamie says confidently. “More specifically: this.”

She’s pointing to a spot about midway down the sole of her foot, a spot Dani only just now can see is actually a small three-pronged scar. She frowns. 

“What happened there?”

She’s a bit afraid to ask, if she’s honest. Jamie has told her so many stories over the years, and they’ve gotten progressively more intense, progressively more violent. She's not sure her heart could take it if Jamie were to tell her this was from some unexpectedly grievous injury. 

“You sure you want to know?” Jamie asks gravely. “It’s quite the story. I mean, really, this is among my best. I’ve saved it just for a night like this one.”

Her mouth is somber, but her eyes are dancing. Dani feels herself smile, just a little. 

“Tell me,” she says, settling her head in Jamie’s lap. 

_Jamie has been working for the Wingrave family for a couple of years, and it’s been better--and worse--than she could have imagined. The land is sprawling and fertile, incredibly eager to grow whatever she plants. Her rose gardens--and they are_ her _gardens, make no mistake--are thriving. Sometimes, she thinks they’re doing better even than the human residents of Bly Manor._

_It’s been a rough couple of years, even with the fulfilling nature of the work. She’s met people she can’t help regarding with a deep affection bordering on family: Hannah, and Owen, and Rebecca, and the kids. She’s met some she doesn’t get on with so well: namely, that prick Peter Quint. And things have happened, things no one could guess at or control. Lord and Lady Wingrave, once so kind and generous to her, are gone. Rebecca is gone, too, in a fresher sense. Jamie’s starting to think letting any of these people in was a mistake. People have a way of vanishing._

_The plants, though. The plants are lush and green and loving. It’s silly, but Jamie thinks they believe in her more than anyone else ever has._

_This middle ground between grieving people and loving the gardens of Bly is where she’s grown most comfortable, and it is that comfort she blames for being surprised when things change one sunny day._

_She’s been puttering around the greenhouse for a couple of hours, glad to have the time away from prying eyes and whispering children. Flora and Miles--Flora more than Miles, lately--are charming, even wonderful, for kids, but they’re also under the age of thirteen. Jamie rarely knows what to do with kids that small, save for tossing them over her shoulder and teasing them mercilessly. They make her think of days long gone, of brothers not seen in two decades, and it scratches a strange, painful itch she doesn’t like thinking about._

_So, the greenhouse. Quiet, off-set from the main property, a nice place to prepare pots and experiment with seeds. She likes it out here better than anywhere, except maybe the roses._

_She especially likes how no one visits her out here. Not even Hannah or Owen, who know her better than most, and therefore understand a person’s need for solitude. No one comes out here at all--which is why, when she raises her eyes and spots a figure passing the window, she almost shouts with surprise._

_Blonde, she registers. Blonde, and a sweater in some pastel off-shade of purple, and--_

Who the hell...

_She’s drifting toward the door, she realizes only when her legs carry her through and out onto the lawn. The woman is walking with Flora, talking to her in a voice that does not carry out to Jamie. The new au pair, she realizes. Rebecca’s replacement. Of course; they were bound to find one eventually._

_And something about this one..._

_She isn’t looking where she’s going. It’s a rookie mistake, especially out here where the ground slopes and there are as many holes dug by rabbits as by Jamie’s own hand, and while she’s gazing after the blonde woman’s retreating form--_

_\--her foot comes down on the upturned teeth of a fallen rake._

_The breath whistles out of her through clenched teeth, pain shooting up through the bottom of her foot in radial bursts. She hops for a second, grabbing hold of the greenhouse wall, and grasps her ankle for a better look._

_“Son of a,” she hisses. These boots were good, once, but good only lasts so long on a fresh-out-of-prison budget. Three of the four teeth she managed to land on have punched straight through the base of the shoe and into her skin._

_“Jesus,” she mutters in mild disbelief. Years without injury on this property, and the first time she deals herself a good one, it’s because she was mooning after some woman she’s never even seen before,_ Jesus _fucking_ wept _._

_At least she’s way out here, all on her own. At least there are bandages and a slightly less beloved pair of boots to change into. No one ever has to be the wiser._

“You see?” Jamie makes a grand gesture, wiggling her toes. “My most glorious story yet.”

Dani sits up, mouth working, unable to land on any one expression. “Are...did that really happen?”

“Did I step on a rake like a true goddamn idiot because I’d just caught my first glimpse of one Dani Clayton, you mean?”

“Yes,” Dani says, her throat suddenly dry. Her eyes are itching, tears pulling at the corners. Jamie smiles fondly. 

“I did. But I recovered myself marvelously. Bet you didn’t even notice the limp.”

“You weren’t limping,” Dani recalls, remembering in a hot rush how Jamie had strolled into the kitchen that afternoon. She’d looked so at home, so confident. Dani had felt instantly, wildly, as though they’d already done this once before. Like taking a test to which she had all of the answers. 

“I was not,” Jamie confirms. “Because I’d already spotted you once and made a fool of myself, and I was not about to pull that trick off again. Did you think I was cool?”

“The coolest,” Dani says, unable to stop the tears from spilling over onto her smile. Jamie pulls her close, kissing her forehead, rubbing comforting shapes into her back. 

“Then mission very much accomplished. Want you to know, though, it did hurt like a--”

“Why are you telling me now?” Dani asks from against her chest. Jamie pauses.

“Why am I telling you my deepest, most embarrassing secret?”

Dani nods, sniffling a little. Jamie thinks on it. 

“Because,” she says at last, reaching down to tip a finger under Dani’s chin until their eyes meet. “There are some people you don’t want to keep anything from. Some people who have earned rights to every story in your book. That one? That scar? No one knows about that. Just me. And now you.”

It means more than Dani could possibly explain. More than she could clarify, even to herself. Jamie, seeming to understand the hugeness of such a small moment, pulls her close again, kissing her with all the weight of thirteen years finally at home. 

**6**

Jamie’s body is a map of scars, she thinks sometimes. A map of all the strange little accidents and intricacies of a human experience. Things that have gone wrong, so wrong, in her life as to leave a permanent mark in their wake. They’re on her back, her thigh, her side, her scalp, her foot. A road map of a life lived fully, if not always precisely well. 

None, though. None could match this one. 

She won’t show it off to anyone. Won’t have an ugly raised bit of flesh where the wound sealed over and made itself whole enough to carry again. Won’t have a cute story of clumsiness or a vicious tale of chivalry to back it up. This kind of scar, she thinks, is different in a way no one could understand unless they bear its ilk themselves. 

The letter stays by the bed. Every night, before completing the ritual of Dani’s shirt, Dani’s pillow, Dani’s reflection refusing to show itself in the bath, Jamie picks it up. She had it memorized by the end of the first night back here, alone, pressing as close to Dani’s side of the bed as she’d dared. One night, spent back in their bed with all its pillows and blankets and emptiness. 

And then, never again. She reads here, sometimes, remembering the way Dani would lean back against the headboard and watch old movies. She’ll do paperwork among sheets where Dani once lay, sprawled naked and happily asleep. She makes the bed each day as though it had been slept in the night before, rumpling the blankets a little before leaving the apartment so she’ll have something to fix when evening comes around again. 

But she doesn’t sleep here. Not without Dani. Not ever. 

She stays, instead, on the couch. Turns it to face the front door, with the lock that always seemed to stick with Dani’s key in it, and turned smooth as butter for Jamie. She props that door open with one of her oldest shoes, careless of whether it will still be there in the morning. Dani’s shoes, the heels she hated and the flats she wore everywhere and the sneakers that had started off Jamie’s and been slowly co-opted onto Dani’s side of the closet, stay safely tucked away. If one of those went missing, the price of some desperate thief in the night, Jamie suspects she’d lose her mind trying to track it down. 

She stays on the couch, door open just a crack, bathtub full. That first night, she’d thought about just laying down in that bath and letting herself fall asleep. A bad thought. A thought running contrary to Dani’s final word on the subject. That Jamie was, above all else, to keep going without her. That she believed with her whole heart that this was the right answer. That she’d see Jamie again, and Jamie would be able to tell her off then, tell her off, and kiss her blind, and love her endlessly. 

But first: this one thing. This one last, hopeful thing. To keep living. To keep going. 

_The worst thing_ , Jamie thinks each night, laying with pillows behind her back and her eyes on the door, _she’s ever asked of me._ Maybe the only bad thing Dani has ever asked of her in almost fifteen years. Dani was never cruel, not once, but sometimes Jamie is still angry with her for this much. For doing exactly the one thing she knew Jamie could not deny her. For asking this kind of oath. 

She can’t show this kind of scar to friends at parties, can’t find the words to spin out a pretty story about how it mapped its way onto her body. All she can do is sleep with it each night. Wake with it each morning. Walk with it each day. Sleep. Wake. Walk. And know, deep down, that there is nothing like a scar left by someone like Dani. 

Nothing in the world like it. 

Sometimes, with her eyes squeezed shut and one of Dani’s shirts against her skin, she thinks she can still feel a hand tracing the spot on her back, that spot just under her shoulder where a small girl once dragged a boiling pot off a lit burner. Sometimes, if she closes her eyes hard enough, if she lets herself drift through the black dots behind her eyelids, she imagines slim fingers finding the raised edges, mapping them with such care, such wondering love. 

She wishes Dani could ask after this one, too. She wishes more than anything she could turn a corner and there Dani would be, asking how she missed another one, how she possibly could have one more story to unburden. _How would I even explain it_ , she wonders. _How could I even tell this kind of tale?_

Maybe she’ll work it out, someday. Maybe. She can’t imagine anyone wanting to hear it. Can’t imagine anyone understanding the kind of print, the kind of wound, the kind of sear one person leaves on another when they’re gone for good. Maybe someday. Maybe Owen would, or Henry. Maybe she could...

But not now. Not yet. The wound is still open, still bleeding, and every day, she finds something new to pick at its edges. A journal Dani bought and only wrote in three times. A sock lost under the couch on laundry day. A package of those silly hair ties Dani liked, the ones Jamie liked to pull gently from her hair until it tumbled in waves around her shoulders. 

The place still smells of her. Jamie knows that will change, is nearly wild with horror at the idea of it. She goes to the shop in a daze one day, impulse-buys an entire cart of Dani’s shampoo. Her brand of deodorant. Her perfume, used only on special occasions like birthdays and engagement dinners and when she just wanted to get Jamie into bed for the hell of it. 

This is what a scar does, Jamie thinks, staring fixedly into a mirror that stubbornly refuses to show her blonde hair and a wry little grin. This is what a scar is. One that sits in your chest. One that sits here, and tears itself back open every time you think you’re starting to heal. It picks at you. It owns you. 

A story for another time, maybe. Another night, maybe. 

Right now, Dani is a scar Jamie couldn’t share even if she wanted to. Dani is hers alone to carry. 

She sleeps, and she dreams, and from somewhere far, far away, she imagines Dani pressing a kiss against her heart. 


End file.
